Foodie Fantastic

Amanda and I were treated to a night of fabulous experiences courtesy of our foodie boss, Jason. Jason is a farmer and wild edibles expert (in my humble opinion) and we spent the evening getting to take a small part in his busy food-filled life! When we got to the house we immediately got to work mashing persimmons from a local tree to make a persimmon pudding.



Jason also grows shittake mushrooms on logs in his house. Unfortunately neither he nor his family actually likes mushrooms, so....... Amanda and I reaped the bounty! He handed us a knife and told us to go to town! Of course, you didn't have to tell us twice. I can already smell the stir-fry!

One of Jason's many activities is bee keeping. We helped him extract the honey from the honeycombs. First we had to use little scraper tools to un-cap them.

Then we loaded up the honeycomb-filled boards (I don't know what those are called...) into a giant spinner. Amanda likened it to a giant salad spinner. With the force of the spinning, the honey flies out and splatters the inside, eventually dripping down and pooling in the bottom.

More scraping.

Here's an inside view of the spinner with honey at the bottom in all of it's sticky, golden goodness.

So after we spun all of the honey out of the honeycombs, we opened the spout and collected all of that liquid gold in buckets. After filtering it, it was ready to be jarred! I'm hoping to eventually make some mead with it!

Look at this bounty we brought home from a night at Jason's house! Persimmon pudding, a bag of shittake mushrooms, some sage, a bag of dry snow-capped beans, and three giant jars of golden honey!!! Foodie fantastic, indeed!